I am a Partner with Future Workplace, an executive development firm that assists organizations in re-thinking, re-defining and re-imagining their corporate recruiting, learning & talent management strategies to prepare for the 2020 workplace. I am the co-author of the best selling book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop & Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (Harper Collins) and also the author of two books on Corporate Universities: Lessons In Building A World-Class Workforce.
I have spent much of my career in marketing, human resources, and corporate learning roles and now I consult for FORTUNE 1000 firms. I actively follow and write about mega trends of globalization, multiple generations and social media with an emphasis on how these trends impact the workplace of the future. I live in New York City and enjoy the energy of living and working among 8 million people.

Will Your Klout Score Get You Hired? The Role of Social Media in Recruiting

Third-party sites that rate “influence” are relatively new on the scene, but they’re already changing the way recruiting is done. Current frontrunner Klout, which launched in 2008, was the first popular social media analytics service. It aims to measure users’ influence across their social network, and does so by pulling data from various social profiles and churning out a score based on a specific, if mysterious, algorithm.

Klout may have its flaws – many users are skeptical about the algorithm, especially after a retooling in October knocked many users down by 20 points or more – including this Forbes contributor. (“I got everything short of death threats,” Klout CEO Joe Fernandez said of the blowback.) But over six months later, users have accepted Klout’s new calculations – so much so that Klout is on its way to becoming an integral part of the job search and recruiting process for many individuals and companies.

“We look at this as similar to an SAT,” says Klout spokeswoman Lynn Fox. “It is one of many factors that is considered when a person applies to a university. Likewise, the Klout Score can be used as one of many indicators of someone’s skill set.”

How Klout Works

Though it started as a corollary of Twitter, Klout now pulls data from as many as twelve social media platforms, depending on the user’s preference. Klout monitors the user’s activity on each of these profiles, and crunches those numbers into a few key metrics: Your “True Reach” score indicates how many people you influence – the number of people who respond or share (repost, retweet, etc.) when you post a message. “Amplification” is a measure of how much you influence those people. Finally, your “Network” takes into account the influence of the friends you’re connected to on Twitter, Facebook, and your other networks. Your overall Klout score is a combination of all of these metrics.

Reppify, a San Francisco-based startup, creates a “job fit score” for candidates and companies based on social media presence, among other things. Some may find such scoring reductive, but as CEO Chirag Nangia sees it, creating quantifiable measures of job fitness in fact represents a step up from the traditional recruiting process.

Research shows that recruiters spend an average of only six seconds looking at each resume they consider, and often make decisions based on subjective measures or gut instinct. Reppify’s scoring method theoretically accounts for much more than those six seconds could. “You have things like Klout and Kred and all these other things which are in some cases very pertinent,” Nangia said. “If someone’s hiring for a marketing position, that could be really important.”

The hiring managers at Klout, for their part, do take prospective employees’ Klout scores into account when reviewing applicants – even though Mr. Fernandez knows that move can be controversial. “People are emotionally attached to their score. It is tied to their ego,” he told Fox News Latino.

Silencing the Skeptics

The average user is still skeptical about the presence of “influence” scores on resumes and in the recruiting process. In a Washington Post.com poll, 50% of readers said that job applicants should “absolutely not” include a Klout score on their resumes.

But forward-thinking companies and employers recognize that social media is the platform of the future. Whether or not you work in an industry where building your online influence matters (i.e. public relations, marketing or sales), over the next decade you will be hired and promoted based upon your reputation capital.

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I’m invariably reminded of Klout every day since it is rare there is not a “I just gave so-and-so +K in such-and-such” in my Twitter stream. I generally scroll on up without a second thought. When I get a series of emails proclaiming someone has given me Klout in something, I tend to check and see as my curiosity then gets the better of me.

For job applications, they can check if they want, but I prefer to use an actual example of my network and its usefulness rather than a score determined by a secret sauce that can be gamed.

If the company prefers Klout scores over actual examples, I have no problem moving on. I’d rather work for a company that wants concrete examples of success than one that relies on the whims of an algorithm that has yet to demonstrate usefulness beyond customer service.

Gwynne, The companies that are most likely looking at Klout scores are doing this for applicants in high profile jobs like PR, Marketing, Sales and it is only one of several measures of the candidate. Companies like Klout (that do use this in hiring considerations) say this is becoming one measure of your social media literacy! Yes it is a brave new world of recruiting and I think this is just the beginning…

Never because Klout is garbage. Honestly if we’ve become this desperate to be singled out…what has become of the work place.

your RESUME (you know that thing they only look at for 6 seconds) should be digested like a good book by the person who is hiring…its no wonder employment has become a social status like high school now…

your ability to do the job, your understanding of the role and your ability to work with the team…are more important than how well you blog, tweet or how many people you influence on facebook…

Never because Klout is garbage. Honestly. we’ve become this sad and pathetic needy society that needs to be made to feel important about everything we do……what has become of the work place.

your RESUME (you know that thing they only look at for 6 seconds) should be digested like a good book by the person who is hiring…its no wonder employment has become a social status like high school now…

your ability to do the job, your understanding of the role and your ability to work with the team…are more important than how well you blog, tweet or how many people you influence on facebook…

An individual’s Klout score should never be used to make any decisions. In my opinion, a Klout score is nothing more than a form of entertainment. The paragraph in this article that explains how Klout works is proof of the fallacies that this number provides. The number is gauged on how active you are as well as how many people you influence, but doesn’t seem to take into account the quality of your activity. I can post links to Lolcats, which might generate lots of “Likes” and comments about how cute the kitten is. My friends and followers might, in turn, share this with their Facebook friends and Twitter followers, thereby raising my Klout score. Does me posting videos and pictures of cute cats properly assess my skill set? Perhaps I choose not to post videos about cats but economic analyses from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office about the trends of the economy and what this means to working individuals. Does my failure to generate a lot of attention and redistribution indicate that I’ll be a failure of an employee and shouldn’t get hired? I agree with Johnny RogueRecords; your resume is a much better indicator. If hiring managers want good talent, then maybe they should spend more time looking at a resume and grilling potential candidates in interviews, and not rely on artificial numbers based off of a mysterious algorithm.

Companies that are using klout scores in hiring (like Klout itself) say this is jsut one indication and often it is used for those applying in world of social media where one’s ability to build a personal brand online is relevant ot their job! In the end, your ability to deliver results are the ultimate test for hiring managers.

Hold on. Social media is definitely the future and I have no doubt it can be incorporated into hiring practices but please, please, please let’s not wrap too much into whether or not Candidate A is better because they have a Klout score of 55 as compared to Candidate B who has a Klout score of 43. It’s wrong on so many levels.

For one, when you look purely at Klout score, you haven’t taken into consideration the candidate’s OFFLINE behavior and skils. And Klout cannot do that. It can’t even completely measure all of the social networks that a person is on and is heavily weighted toward Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Yet, thanks to this juicy little number that somehow ties it all up in a bow in an algorithm that’s hard to understand, is far from perfect and isn’t all that transparent as to why it swings up and down wildly some days, HR people are supposed to make intelligent hiring decisions?

I don’t buy it. And neither should you. Believe it or not, I’m not even saying Klout is bad. I have a Klout account, I check it and I’m interested in the development of social media influence. But I’m saying it’s bad to put this much weight on a hiring decision with it and doing so is not a responsible approach to the process.

Thanks for your comments as you can see from all the comments this is a lively topic. There are certain jobs where knowing a person’s klout score is one indication among many of the individual’s social media literacy and the commitment to build one’s personal brand. I can think of key jobs like that of a social media manager, or online community manager where building your “online klout” is important to getting and advancing in the job. If you think of this with a frame of “does this fit with the person’s job” then it is quite a different view on individual capabilities.

Although I agree that one’s Klout score is not the be-all, end-all decision making factor on one’s resume, I do believe that as time goes on it will become more sophisticated and carrier heavier weight. After all, Klout is still in beta.

The fact of the matter is that online influence, however it is looked at or scored, is important. A great book that explains the power of influence online is “Return on Influence” by Mark Schaefer. Worth the read, whatever your mindset.

Whether or not you should include your Klout score on your resume is, like many pieces of a resume, dependent on the potential employer. Your write for your audience, right? Resumes should be tailored for the position being applied for. In my place of employment (PR & marketing firm), a Klout score on a resume shows forward thinking, social literacy (which is crucial in our field), and creativity.

There are a lot of things to say about online influence and the ambition to measure it. For a somewhat older – but non the less interesting – (international) discussion I Like to revere to LinkedIn: http://lnkd.in/fw6_ta

Further more I like to make a few remarks on getting your Klout score or in fact any score on a ‘social media activity’ tool. The most perks I get on Klout are from people I ‘know’online. Most of them I never met. That’s not as bad as it sounds -as for Klout en tools alike I am what content and activity I produce online!

There’s a but though. A year ago I Entered Empire Avenue. A game it was said. For me by that time it was way further than Klout in measuring online activity and besides that it made it really easy to connect to people that were either interesting or appealing to me. And thus I was able to ask people for example to write on my blog (Forbes: The 10 Top Women Social Media Influencers & Their Connection with Empire Avenue http://ow.ly/aLz6l ).

Hey all great right? But then I noticed that I can also ask / or even pay (virtually) for +Klout , FB likes or whatever you want. I know cause I tried it! Conclusion: It’s not the fault of community’s like Empire avenue (still love it as a networking tool), it’s people always looking for a loophole or a way to bypass rules or bounderies. Klout is subject to that. Besides that – imho – people are more then their online (in)activaty.